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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#31

Post by CuriouslyC »

admissionsguy wrote: post #14
CuriouslyC wrote: post #10

I don't think it'll contract. The people dumping their money into AI think we are at end of days, new order for humanity type point, and they're willing to risk a large part of their fortune to ensure that they remain part of the empowered elite in this new era. It's an all hands on deck thing and only hard diminishing returns that make the AI takeoff story look implausible are going to cause a retrenchment.

So just the “it’s different this time” mentality shared by all bubbles. Some things never change.

The final AI push that doesn't lead to a winter will look like a bubble until it hits. We're realistically ~3 years away from fully autonomous software engineering (let's say 99.9% for a concrete target) if we can shift some research and engineering resources towards control, systems and processes. The economic value of that is hard to overstate.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#32

Post by viking123 »

huvarda wrote: post #16
pryelluw wrote: post #9

Article is behind paywall and is simply saying the same things that people have been saying about the post tech crash. Now, what this sort of article tends to miss (and I will never know because it’s paywalled like a jackass) is that these models services are used by everyday people for every day tasks. Doesn’t matter if they’re good or not. It enables them to do less work for the same pay. Don’t focus on the money t…

A handful of the largest companies cyclically investing and buying from each other is propping up the entire economy. Also stuff like Deepseek and other open source models exist. Unless AGI comes from LLMs (it absolutely won't) then its foolish to think there wont be a bubble

AGI might require a nobel price level invention, I am not even sure it will come in my lifetime and I am in my 30s.. Although I would hope we would get something that could solve difficult diseases that have more or less no treatment or cure today, at least Demis Hassabis seems interested in that.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#33

Post by tbrownaw »

rimeice wrote: post #2

> Some people think artificial intelligence will be the most important technology of the 21st century. I don’t, I think a workable fusion reactor will be the most important technology of the 21st century.

We'll finally have electricity that's too cheap to meter.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#34

Post by Bigsy »

rimeice wrote: post #2

> Some people think artificial intelligence will be the most important technology of the 21st century. I don’t, I think a workable fusion reactor will be the most important technology of the 21st century.

Deepmind are working on solving the plasma control issue at the moment, I suspect they're probably using a bit of AI.... and I wouldn't put it past them to crack it.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#35

Post by piva00 »

kumarm wrote: post #12
hemloc_io wrote: post #7

The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today. Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI…

[even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.] Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Current AI tools may not beat the best programmer, they definitely improves average programmer efficiency.

The question is: is that value worth the US$400bi per year of investment sucking out all the money from other ventures?

It's a damn good tool, I use it, I've learned the pitfalls, it has value but the inflation of potential value is, by definition, a bubble...

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#36

Post by aiisnotjustah »

I'm not following the arguments in the blog at all tbh.

The small huge companies investing in AI are tech companies who already make a lot of money. They did not invest in 'manufacturing' or other things on the side as relevant as the blog makes it.

The offshoring of manufacturing to China was a result of cost and shareholder value. But while USA got rich in 60-90 for manufacturing, now this moved over to China.

The investment is not just going into LLM, its going into ML and Robotics. The progress of ML and Robotics in the last x years is tremendous.

And the offshoring of Datacenters? DCs have very little personel they need, they are critical infrastructure you want to control. There is very little motivation to just 'offshore' critical infrastructure espescially from companies who are so rich, that they don't need to move them in some weird shitty location which only makes sense because energy is cheap but everything else is bad.

The 'AI Bubble' i'm experiencing, is adding real value left and right. And no i'm not talking about only LLMs. I'm talking about LLMs and ML in general.

This 'Bubble' is disrupting every single market out there. Everyone is searching for the niche not optimized yet and only accessable now tx to LLMs and ML.

And if you think this is just some hype and will go away, have you even tried Chat GPTs voice mode? This was literaly NOT possible 5 years ago. And i have real gains like 20% and more in plenty of things i'm now leveraging ML and LLms which was also NOT possible 5 years ago.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#38

Post by _heimdall »

leojfc wrote: post #17
throw0101d wrote: post #3

Perhaps worth remembering that 'over-enthusiasm' for new technologies dates back to (at least) canal-mania: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Mania

Absolutely. Years ago I found this book on the topic really eye-opening: - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Technological-Revolutions-Financial... The process of _actually_ benefitting from technological improvements is not a straight line, and often requires some external intervention. e.g. it’s interesting to note that the rising power of specific groups of workers as a result of industrialisation + unionisation then argua…

My understanding is that the 40 hour work week (and similar) was talked about for centuries by workers groups but only became a thing once governments during WWI found that longer days didn't necessarily increase output proportionally.

For a 4 day week to really happen st scale, I'd expect we similarly need the government to decide to roll it out rather than workers groups pushing it from the bottom up.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#39

Post by lm28469 »

billy99k wrote: post #27
hemloc_io wrote: post #7

The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today. Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI…

"Where's the business value? " Have you ever used an LLM? I use it every day to help me with research and completing technical reports (which used to be a lot more of my time). Of course you can't just use it blindly, but it definitely adds value.

Does it bring more value than it cost ? That's the real question.

Nobody doubt it works, everybody doubt Altboy when he asks $7 trillion

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#40

Post by rwmj »

Also no one is talking about how exposed we are to Taiwan. Nvidia, AMD, Apple, any company building out GPUs (so Google, Microsoft, Meta etc), even Intel a bit, are all manufacturing everything with one company, and it's largely happening in Taiwan.

If China invades Taiwan, why wouldn't TSMC, Nvidia and AMD stock prices go to zero?

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